Here is the next Trans challenge questionnaire:
4) How did your family take it when you came out? If you are not out, why aren’t you?
It took me a long time to come out because I was in the military and then I also wasn't sure I would be able to reach my transition goals. I came out to my job first because I wanted to see if I needed a new job or if they would let me stay. My job was great they were surprised that I thought I would lose my job. When I came out to friends I actually gained more friends. The reason i came out to friends first is I wanted to push away anyone that had a negative attitude about my transition before I began. I then told my brother because I knew he would be the most accepting. He was and still is very supportive as well as his husband. I told my grandma next who I knew would be the next closest to being supportive. She is for the most part but very rude about my name because she doesn’t like what I changed it to. Other than that she is very supportive except she is always comparing me to Chaz Bono. I told my mom last because I wasn't sure how she would handle it. She was very supportive and nice about it until it became close to be getting started on hormone therapy. She started trying to talk my brother into talking me out of the transition. She is rude and disrespectful about my transition. I talked to her to ask her to please respect my wish to go by Jasper and to try to use the correct pronouns. She feels this is a way to hurt her and its to hard to accept. She feels I should just be happy she didn't abandon me and is willing to still be in my life. She even had the nerve to say she can see why friends and family abandon trans ppl. It is to difficult to handle such a transition, its not that they don't love them they just can’t handle the change. I was so shocked she could feel and think that way. I personally think abandoning someone because they are trans is awful and you can't care for that person if you abandon them. How would those people feel if that trans person had no support becomes depressed and kills themself? I'd feel like it was part of my fault because I wasn't there for that person. I don't know I'm starting to debate about cutting off ties with my mom because I can't take her crap about this.
This was my response to the question what is yours?
My first transition attempt when I was 17 (in1962) was an unmitigated failure, partly because I tried to do it without any support of any kind (it was like that back then). During the 10 years intervening before I started my 2nd (and successful) transition, my father died - which was a blessing to me in many ways as he would have had me sectioned into a mental hospital if he had known. He was a very bigoted person and hated people of colour, gays, gypsies, anybody different in any way to him.
After seeing my GP and being referred to the psychiatrist at my local hospital - who tried to persade me to have electro-convulsive shock therapy and when that failed he tried to suggest I take male hormones "to make a man out of me". That thought appalled me and I eventually persuded him to refer me to the newly opened GIC in Withington in Manchester. It was there that they acknowledged that I had GID and started me on cross-hormone therapy. It was then that I had to either come out to my mother or disappear from her life forever - without explanation. So I took the bull by the horns and one weekend, went to visit her and tell her what was happening.
Fortunately she was incredibly supportive - as were all of my relatives, with the one exception of my brother and he was luke warm. Never shunned me or disowned me, but could never get his head round the fact that his little brother was now his little sister.
Only a few of my friends at that time were supportive though and we drifted apart and I made new friends who didn't know (or didn't care) about my past.